Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
I've been sharing mostly digital art the past few months, but since we're at Art Attack #150 now I thought I'd share something special; a craft project my friends and I did back in Feb 2021! It's actually pretty similar to my 100th post, when we made a cat house out of cardboard, but with a different design!
My friend Kai and I are huge fans of the cat collecting game, Neko Atsume, so we wanted to model the cat house after one of the houses from the game! Previously, we did an actual house that looked like this:
But this time we thought we'd be more adventurous and try a cat cafe design! It's also from Neko Atsume and turns out this actually does exist in real life because there are some merchandise you can buy online so you can design your own house to look like Neko Atsume too!
Source: grapee.jp
Of course this was quite some time ago so I'm not sure if you could still get them now, but I thought it was so cool these actually existed! So we knew it was definitely possible to make it ourselves and it should be pretty doable too.
I guess the main difference in construction between this cat cafe house and the other house we did would be the curved roof, so we thought of some ways to do it and cut up some boxes we had lying around and curved it slightly in a way that it could drape over a sturdy box we cup the front of so it looked something like this:
It was actually pretty impressive how well it came together so quickly! We cut the curves on the edge of the awning and it came out really well too!
We had to use quite a bit of duct tape and lots of other tape to secure the roof since it kept bouncing back up but after securing it it seemed to hold up pretty well! We also used a smaller box on top of the base to hold the awning in place.
The next thing was to cover up the sides of the roof, and for this one my friend had an idea of slotting the sides in so we didn't have to cut a perfect semicircle.
She got to work cutting slits on the side flaps so we could fold it in and secure it.
We wanted to minimise the amount of tape on the outside since we were afraid the cats might scratch it or take it apart, or worse get stuck on the tape. And if we had used tape here it would've ruined the nice edge of the roof. We tested out the slotting of the flaps and it surprisingly worked!
It needed a few adjustments so we snipped off a little bit more of the edges to make it fit in better.
This actually took quite a bit of time since we tried our best to make it perfectly fit. We had to add in some extra tape on the inside to make it stick better.
It took a lot of adjusting and more snipping but eventually it did fit it quite snugly.
Eventually, our cardboard house was nicely constructed and ready for paint! We even added a small box inside the cafe to make it more accurate to how it looks in-game.
We did end up using masking tape on the outside of the box just to ensure everything was secure and wouldn't fall out since it was threatening to. But my friend (who's a seasoned cat owner) assured that the masking tape would hold up against cat claws and is definitely safer than duct tape so we had to cover it too.
After that we got to work painting! The green definitely took the longest time but it was fairly therapeutic and I did enjoy it quite a bit.
We mainly painted the outside of the box just to make it look pretty since the inside wouldn't really be noticeable.
After I painted the sides we even added some embellishments like side windows made of masking tape and of course wrote Cafe on the roof so it would look just like the one in-game!
So this is what the in-game cardboard cafe looks like:
And this was the version we made!
It actually looked really good! I thought it might've been a little too open but my friend assured me that it was fine and cats didn't really mind. The important thing was the shelter it provided.
My friend Kai brought the cat cafe house back for her cat, because the last time we left our cardboard cat house in the void decks for stray cats to use it actually got stolen! Not wanting to let our hard work go to waste, she brought it home in case her cat wanted to use it.
I don't think Kitty was very inclined on using it though, but she did feed her at the cardboard cafe so it looked like she was eating out of the cafe! It was so cute! But I think she preferred shoeboxes and the Cafe we made was too fancy for her tastes.
In the end her cat wasn't really using the cafe much, so she gave it away to one of her relatives and their cat took to it really well!
I'm just glad someone we knew could benefit from our hard work this time and loved it! I wish we could do more for stray cats but I've been reading about people making similar cardboard cat houses around Singapore for our many stray cats so it's not too bad!
Source: mothership
Overall, these were super fun projects to work on together and also helped us save the environment since we recycled a perfectly good cardboard box! We also had an enjoyable time doing arts and crafts together so it was an afternoon well spent! If you have stray cats in your neighbourhood, I recommend doing the same if you have boxes just lying around! It's a fun activity for all ages so kids can get involved too!
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
